Spufford's research at times also takes him into odd territories. One chapter documents the development of lung-cancer at the molecular level, and another, rather incongruously for a male author, a highly detailed account from a woman's experience of labour. Overall - strongly recommended both for the topic matter and the fascinating narrative approach. I would also strongly recommend Hadrian 's excellent review and the paper he points to on the mathematical tractability of what the theoretical econometrician's proposed: Oct 14, Ints rated it it was amazing Shelves: Nov 15, Frank Stein rated it really liked it.
Another novel, and one of the strangest I've read in a long, long time.
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
It's a novel based on, of all things, the attempt to transform the Soviet economy using cybernetics and computers in the early s, during Khruschev's cultural "thaw. The story essential Another novel, and one of the strangest I've read in a long, long time. The story essentially revolves around Leonid Kantorovich, the real-life economist who was the only Soviet to ever win the Nobel Prize in Economics, granted for his work on linear programming.
He and a band of merry followers were transported by Soviet central planners to a gilded cage in the Siberian tundra called Akademgorodok "Academyville" , where they were allowed a relative amount of freedom to talk, invent, and experiment, all with the hope that they would come up with exciting new ideas to transform the ailing Soviet system.
Their hopes were later crushed during the Brezhnev crackdown, and some of these brilliant scientists were jailed or exiled. The book's got a strange form. Its divided into six parts, each containing a lengthy introduction explaining the historical background to the following chapters.
Also, the book ends with 60 pages of weighty notes, tracing many of the lines, even from entirely fictional characters, back to some real Soviet source. So overall its tough to classify this book as a straight novel. Also, its different chapters weave across dozen of characters, some of whom are the star of one part only to disappear completely in others. The characters are mainly used to demonstrate some peculiar idea or aspect of the Soviet system, but they are surprisingly well drawn, especially for bureaucrats and economists, and you're almost loathe to leave them at the end of each chapter.
One typical though fascinating part of the book traces how the lives of half a dozen characters are affected by the simple destruction of a viscose machine in a Soviet factory, and how this leads some managers worried about their standing with the party to seek the help of a "tolkach," a Soviet "fixer," to get a new improved machine, whose price, contra to the hopes of the economic reformers, is set by its weight instead of its value!
This strange pricing in turn prevents the factory from selling it for fear of losing money, and the weird negative effects of the Soviet pricing system continue to ripple outwards in the following chapters. In one, a change in the price of meat leads to a riot in the small city of Novocherkassk that ended up killing 29 people really happened. Again and again the book has similar real stories, parables even, that usefully illustrate the problems Kantorovich was trying to solve, and that make the whole economic debate appear lively and interesting. This is a strange but worthwhile book, one that's able to wrestle with big ideas and to show how they impact real people, all without sacrificing much in the way of story or character.
It's also a surprisingly quick read. View all 3 comments. Jan 25, Iain rated it it was amazing. A fictionalized history of Soviet Union economics. Absolutely terrific read, especially in the light of the current financial crisis. If you've ever wondered how the USSR functioned day-to-day, this is the book for you. Spend a few hundred pages in the heads of Spufford's large cast of characters and it will all start to make a certain twisted sense, so much so that you may begin to wonder how Western-style capitalism can possibly function.
As one character asks, "but who tells you how much bread A fictionalized history of Soviet Union economics. As one character asks, "but who tells you how much bread you need to make? The main strand of the story is how the problem of running an efficient command economy was solved , mathematically: It would have worked! Shadow pricing feels like a sci-fi MacGuffin, akin to "psychohistory" in Asimov's Foundation , or the "gordelpus" weapon in Stapledon's Last and First Men.
It comes tantalizingly close, but the system is never fully applied. Applying it partially has disastrous consequences: Towards the end, a Party apparatchik explains to a scientist, as if to a child how this magical pricing system could never have worked, as it would always be compromised by corruption all along the supply chain.
Or is it simply that the Party was unwilling to relax their rigidly centralized control? Another reaction I have to this story is that, like it or not, the ends justify the means in public consciousness. We see the Soviet Union as a failure not just because of the grim lives of its inhabitants, but because it failed. If it had been a roaring success, the inhabitants' lives wouldn't have been grim; they wouldn't necessarily be free , but would we care so much about that?
Spufford's book paints a vivid picture of the Soviet Union as a promised fairyland built on a nightmarish bloodbath the Stalinist purges , and various characters wrestle with the existential crisis this creates. If the grand project succeeded, could we possibly accept the bloodbath as justified?
We accept the United States as a success, despite its early history of slavery and the ethnic cleansing of native inhabitants and its current reliance on foreign sweatshop labour. The British Empire is less well-regarded these days; only because it ultimately failed?
We at least have the freedom to criticize our society, unlike the citizens of the USSR. I've been discussing Red Plenty purely as a history so far. Does it hold up as a novel? Spufford's characters both real and fictional are vividly drawn and true to life. It's tinged with just enough Russian-ness for me to be intriguing and surprising, but not so much as to make the characters' motivations incomprehensible. The overall effect is completely immersive. On top of this—particularly impressive for a non-fiction author edging tentatively into fiction—the writing is beautiful , with some absolutely cracking turns of phrase.
Spufford mostly restrains himself from poetic flights of fancy, but the moments where he lets loose are particularly memorable: The book ends with an extensive array of footnotes explaining the historical basis of his story, and picking apart documented events from his fictional interpolations.
I'd love to see an annotated Red Plenty with the story and footnotes on alternate pages. I guess it might spoil the flow of the story, but it would let the reader fully appreciate the depth and rigour of research that has gone into this book. Mar 19, Nicholas Whyte rated it really liked it. This is a really interesting book, a light on an important period of history the Soviet Union from to of which I knew much less than I had realised, looked at through the eyes of true believers in the economic system of Communism as it developed under Khrushchev, who were then bitterly disappointed as Brezhnev and Kosygin and later Brezhnev alone took over.
I grew up at the tail end of the Brezhnev era, when the Soviet system seemed monolithic and permanent; subsequent events prove This is a really interesting book, a light on an important period of history the Soviet Union from to of which I knew much less than I had realised, looked at through the eyes of true believers in the economic system of Communism as it developed under Khrushchev, who were then bitterly disappointed as Brezhnev and Kosygin and later Brezhnev alone took over.
I grew up at the tail end of the Brezhnev era, when the Soviet system seemed monolithic and permanent; subsequent events proved that in fact it was not nothing of the kind, and Spufford's book reminds us that it was all actually rather recent anyway. Look, Faber, this is simply not good enough. It's up to you if you want to alienate your potential readership; I would have thought not, myself, but what do I know? Jun 30, Shanthanu rated it it was amazing Shelves: How can you not like a novel which begins: What this book is, is a well researched, wonderfully footnoted, novel about the period in Soviet history when some scientists earnestly believed that the communist dream of central planning and efficient optimising of the economy by the government could finally be achieved in reality thanks to advances in mathematics, cybernetics and economics.
Spufford shows us how the human element enters this optimisation problem, at various levels in the form of the bosses in the Central Committee, striking low-paid workers, small-time factory managers worried about fulfilling quotas, and a whole lot of others. And if all this still doesn't get you interested, there's a chapter about lung cancer written from a molecular biology point of view, with enzymes and free radicals as the principal protagonists.
Jul 16, Gwern rated it really liked it. Depicts how Russia fell into the middle-income trap and stagnated, and illuminates the early growth of Russia's industrialization and why Khrushchev thought Russia could bury the US not in dirt, but manufactured goods. Jan 22, Horza added it. Wasn't planning on re-reading this even though it had recently returned to my possession after a long stay on another's shelf, but a couple of days ago I popped it open and there it all was: Kantorovich's tram ride, poor old Emil, Nikita Sergeyevich, the monkish man.
All are enfolded into interlocking tales of linear programming, vacuum tubes and human frailty in a strange faraway land, narrated with warmth and invention. GR ate my review. A formally innovative and unexpectedly interesting take on a moment in Soviet economic and scientific history. Spufford shows himself a dab hand at both economic exposition and short fiction - the whole is far more interesting than I would have expected a book on pricing theory could ever be! Mar 12, J. Comparing the two elements fiction and nonfiction in Red Plenty, I think I would have preferred a straightforward narrative history over fiction.
The expository essays that begin each section of the book are well-done on the whole. I also found it interesting to read through Spufford's footnotes, which suggest that the research was there to produce a well-documented nonfiction text. However, all too often I found myself wanting a clearer explanation of the historical context or more insight int Comparing the two elements fiction and nonfiction in Red Plenty, I think I would have preferred a straightforward narrative history over fiction. However, all too often I found myself wanting a clearer explanation of the historical context or more insight into the workings of the Soviet centrally planned economy.
I already understood that the Soviets had a serious problem valuing their economic inputs and outputs and thus assessing their net gains because they lacked pricing feedback on the consumption side due to a lack of markets combined with a political system that largely ignored the expression of people's desires as consumers. Spufford describes how the Soviets were also unable to collect accurate data for their planning processes from the production side of the equation, because nobody would accurately report existing inefficiencies. But the explanation of just how some Soviet intellectuals and economists hoped to control a modern economy through central planning isn't as clear.
In fact, thanks to a rather lengthy aside near the end of the book, I have a much better idea of how smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer than I do of how shadow prices and linear programming were supposed to guarantee economic growth and plenty. So this is largely a story of corruption, venality, and a refusal to accept things as they were as opposed to things as they should have been from an ideological perspective. But that's not a new story by any means, and without more historical detail to provide a stronger sense of cause, effect, and chronology, it isn't particularly engaging, either.
The fictional aspects, on the other hand, consist of a loosely interlinked series of vignettes that fall short of working as complete, independent stories while also failing to tie together to provide a clear, satisfying story arc in which we see characters really develop and change over time. This is due in part to the large number of characters who are introduced and the fashion in which Spufford jumps from topic to topic.
For me, by far the most coherent and successful section of the book is Part IV, consisting of the short pieces "The Method of Balances," "Prisoner's Dilemma," and "Favours. I thought this worked well in terms of presenting economic cause and effect in the Soviet system. Maybe if the rest of the book had been written in the same fashion, my review would have been more positive. It's largely for the quality of that section and the quality of the footnotes that I gave Red Plenty 3 stars instead of 2. On the whole, Spufford's fiction-nonfiction hybrid is an awkward read that did not teach me as much history as I wanted or draw me into its characters enough for me to care about them.
Jan 18, Ernie. Red Plenty is a work of historical fiction that thoroughly blurs the line between "history" and "fiction" in a fascinating way. It recounts the attempts by the Soviet Union in the s to engineer their economy into prosperity and dominance over the West hence "red plenty". Spufford follows several characters -- as varied as an academic economist and Nikita Kruschev himself -- through various disjointed episodes in which they plan, implement, and ultimately recognize the failure of their econ Red Plenty is a work of historical fiction that thoroughly blurs the line between "history" and "fiction" in a fascinating way.
Spufford follows several characters -- as varied as an academic economist and Nikita Kruschev himself -- through various disjointed episodes in which they plan, implement, and ultimately recognize the failure of their economic strategy.
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Even though Red Plenty is a work of fiction and reads like a novel, it is impeccably footnoted and the author generously peppers his interpretation of historical figures with real quotes and, failing that, with real motivations. Spufford is thorough in documenting what part of each chapter is real, and what part is fiction, though even the fiction is often firmly rooted in actual events. Spufford has a gift for taking larger-than-life historical figures and naturally weaving them into the mundane situations of everyday Soviet life.
He also writes a convincing narrative, but this is a double-edged sword. Extensive notes at the end of every chapter make clear that none of Spufford's depictions come from first-hand experience. In fact, there's a sort of "Usual Suspects" effect as each chapter ends, where you aren't sure how much of the preceding narrative you really ought to trust as "genuine. Pardon my use of economics analogies, but this is a novel about macroeconomics written at the micro level.
This is a novel for those fascinated by the other side of the iron curtain and who have more than a passing interest in economics the economics in the novel is not difficult to understand. In fact, the most technically-challenging passage in the whole book is about lung cancer. General fans of historical fiction will also be struck by Spufford's uniquely rigorous approach to his craft. Aug 05, Kseniya Melnik rated it it was amazing Shelves: Brilliant book, a collection of vignettes about life in the USSR in the 60s, which deliberately wears its research on its sleeve or rather, in the Notes section.
Spufford has both historical and novelistic muscle, a lots of sense of humor. This book is a must for anyone who's curious about how research can be incorporated into historical novels. May 16, Kate rated it it was amazing. It was honestly so utterly delightful to read a wonderfully written fiction book about economics and planning.
The latter are huge interests of mine, and Spufford is a really beautiful writer so it's an easy book to breeze through. Historically, there are some issues — Spufford doesn't read Russian and is therefore reliant on English sources, of which he has some questionable choices at times. Red Plenty has the structure of a fairy tale, but without the happy end, and it's truly one of my favourite books this year. May 13, Liam Kofi rated it it was amazing Shelves: Here is the blurb: It was built on the twentieth century magica called "the planned economy", which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things taht the lands of capitalism could never match.
And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late s, the magic seemed to be working. Red plenty is about that moment in hisotry, and how it came, and how it went way; about the brief era when, under the rash Here is the blurb: Red plenty is about that moment in hisotry, and how it came, and how it went way; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche.
It's about the scientits who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
I'll spend most of the time here summarising this book; if you think you would enjoy this book from the description I give then I can guarantee you will - it is a fascinating and well-written piece. But I realise it is not for everyone, so the most I can do is give you an impression of what this is about The best way I can think to describe this book is as the fictional-history of an idea. The book is made up of series of vignettes some of which are connected, others of which are stand alone concerning life in the Soviet Union between to , with most taking place between the late s and mid s.
Each vignette tells the story of a different person or group of people - from Krushchev himself down to rural peasants - who interact in different ways with the idea. Some are real people and real stories, others are fictional. We see how, in response to the demands The Idea places on them, these characters' lives are changed for better or worse. Although there are some recurring characters, it is clear throughout that what we are meant to take away from their lives is really the story of this idea's journey through history - it's attempt to make itself manifest in the concrete affairs of mankind, and how it was helped and hindered along the way.
What is that idea? The belief that through the rational organisation of the resources and productive forces available to us we could bootstrap our way out of the economic problem; we could end scarcity, and make prosperity and plenty available for all. The book tries to explore "the cleverest version of that idea", or the "most subtle of the Soviet attempts" to create a genuine working paradise. This is the version of that idea based on the work of the Nobel prize winning economist, Leonid Kantorovich.
Leonid Kantorovich invented a mathematical technique we now know as linear programming. It is a mathematical technique which amongst other things allows one to identify the best method for achieving your goals within a specified system. In particular, it can be applied to the economic system of a national economy. Kantorovich hoped that by making use of the fact that the Soviet Union in theory had centralised control over all aspects of production we could make actually optimise production within those economies.
This would contrast with capitalist economies, who couldn't take advantage of this technique on a large scale because of their wasteful competition and lack of coordination. Here, in the Soviet Union: So why not optimise it? This might just seem like a bit of dry technicalia, but it should be understood that behind the thought lay as much idealistic optimism as can be found in any literary description of communism.
Kantorovich is presented as thinking to himself: Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply, and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could.
Now would look like only a faint, dirty, unconvincing edition of the real world, which had not yet been born. And he could hasten the hour! For reasons historians still debate, the dream was never realised. By the late s it had died, well before the fall of the Soviet Union. It would be ruining the book to tell you the reasons it presents for that failure, just as much as it would ruin a good detective novel to tell you who done it and why.
I highly recommend finding out yourselves! May 16, Monica rated it really liked it Shelves: This wonderfully strange — or strangely wonderful - book is a novel with 60 some pages of endnotes and a 13 page bibliography about the rise and fall of the planned economy of the USSR from the s to the s. This is one of the most peculiar books I have ever read. It was an incredibly ambitious utopian undertaking — to turn the country into a military superpower, an industrial giant and a thriving consumer society, all at on This wonderfully strange — or strangely wonderful - book is a novel with 60 some pages of endnotes and a 13 page bibliography about the rise and fall of the planned economy of the USSR from the s to the s.
It was an incredibly ambitious utopian undertaking — to turn the country into a military superpower, an industrial giant and a thriving consumer society, all at once. The book is a series of short episodes set in the industrial, agrarian, academic and cybermetric worlds of the USSR. Example — a manufacturing operation needs a new machine to replace one damaged in an industrial accident. The factory which makes the machines has two models — one that duplicates the damaged machine, and a new improved model, which it refuses to sell as a replacement.
Because the new machine sells for less than the old and that would prevent the factory from meeting its profit projection. Why does the new machine sell for less? Because machinery for the chemical industry is priced based on its weight and the new machine which does more than the old, weighs less. Or only the old machine. There are dozens of stories like this, and a cast of characters that ranges from Nikita Khrushchev to minor academics trying to secure a place in this brave new world. It continued to suck resources and human labour in vast quantities into a heavy industrial sector which had once been intended to exist as a springboard for something else, but which by now had become its own justification.
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Soviet industry in its last decades existed because it existed, an empire of inertia expanding ever more slowly, yet attaining the wretched distinction of absorbing more of the total effort of the economy that hosted it than heavy industry has ever done anywhere else in human history, before or since. Every year it produced goods that less and less corresponded to human needs. The control system for industry grew more an more erratic, the information flowing back to the planners grew more and more corrupt. And the activity of industry, all that human time and machine time it used up, added less and less value to the raw materials it sucked in.
Maybe less than none. One economist has argues that, by the end, it was actively destroying value; it had become a system for spoiling perfectly good materials by turning them into objects no one wanted. Jan 15, Kane Faucher rated it it was amazing. These semi-connected vignettes are tied together by the occasionally well-meaning, but sometimes cruelly applied, ideals of planning the way to an abundant future where there are no more wants that cannot be satisfied.
Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream by Francis Spufford
As cyberneticists scheme to introduce vaguely Western concepts of price-value into an automated and computerized economy free of human committee errors, all against a backdrop of the Khruschev "thaw," we also are privy to the everyday managers and intermediaries and apparatchiks t These semi-connected vignettes are tied together by the occasionally well-meaning, but sometimes cruelly applied, ideals of planning the way to an abundant future where there are no more wants that cannot be satisfied.
As cyberneticists scheme to introduce vaguely Western concepts of price-value into an automated and computerized economy free of human committee errors, all against a backdrop of the Khruschev "thaw," we also are privy to the everyday managers and intermediaries and apparatchiks trying to secure their own piece of the "plenty" so frequently promised by the Soviet party elite. There are the usual touching and human moments that lend this rendering of life under the post-Stalin era a kind of added dimensionality.
The dogma still reigns, but it is hollow and mouthed obligingly like an obedient mantra.
Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream
As reality stealthily worms its way into the impossible socialist utopian ideal, the ideal itself comes undone, and each character is set upon to manage this disparity between the folklore myth and the gritty truth of reality in their own way - some will cope by lying to themselves and stubbornly believing, while others escape into different fantasies, and while still others are left in confusion and uncertainty: Against the tired refrain of the abundance to come, the lives of these characters experience the material, intellectual, and spiritual scarcity of the inevitable uncertainty that marbles the otherwise seemingly secure pilasters of life.
Masterfully done, thoroughly researched, and believable. History told through fiction is always entertainingly instructive, but Red Plenty is light years away from the classic historical novel. This is the Soviet Union in the s; while the West wrestles with pop culture and the Cold War, the USSR grapples with maintaining an immense centrally planned economy. The gradual and inevitable slide into irrelevance and inefficiency is documented with riveting detail.
Perhaps what makes this so compelling is that author didn't start out Simply phenomenal. Perhaps what makes this so compelling is that author didn't start out to write a novel. It simply became one. You can imagine him walking the countryside of Alexandrosvk Whire Dust, or standing in the atrium of science in Academgorodok Police in the Forest, , drinking in the sights, sounds and smells, to regurgitate later as pictures in words. So what will he write next? I hope it's a book on medicine. In a couple of places in Red Plenty, he demonstrates a profound understanding of the human body, and an uncanny ability to communicate complexity with clarity.
Definitely one of the best - certainly the most versatile - of modern English authors.
And this is one of his best. Sep 21, Alex Sarll added it. It's a commonplace that the fifties and early sixties was the high water mark of the American Dream - but what about the Soviet Dream? For a minute, with Sputnik and Gagarin, they were in the lead. Under Khrushchev, there was a sense that after the price of war and Stalinism had been paid, maybe this was where the revolution finally started making good on its promises. After all, they were meant to be materialists, weren't they? Shouldn't that mean they ended up with more and better stuff than t It's a commonplace that the fifties and early sixties was the high water mark of the American Dream - but what about the Soviet Dream?
Shouldn't that mean they ended up with more and better stuff than the capitalists? As we all know now, it was not to be. That supposedly rational system was already too much of an ideology, too resistant to change, with too many people invested in its existing form albeit glad to have some of the murderous pressure off. The similarities to other economic systems which may have ended up with utterly perverse outcomes and yet a stranglehold on their societies - say, late capitalism - is never even hinted at, but left for the reader to note.
The similarity to cancer, on the other hand, is made painfully well in one late chapter. I found this on the non-fiction shelf, but as is made clear from the off, some characters are stand-ins for real people or examples of types, some processes have been foreshortened, and other tweaks have been made. Essentially, then, it's kin to Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle and, while unlike Stephenson it has footnotes, belongs on the same shelf.
I'd say the biggest difference to Stephenson's work is that he's showing us the birth of the world we have, whereas this is about the stillbirth of another world that maybe, almost, could have been. I haven't been this impressed with a concept for a long time. It's hard to exactly describe what Red Plenty is like, but a decent starting-off point is the historical fiction trend of the last several years. The author did an immense amount of research on historical figures from a scorned biologist in Akademgorodok to Khrushchev himself , through biographies and their personal stories, and constructed small narratives that each provide a facet of a greater one.
In effect, Spufford set out to de I haven't been this impressed with a concept for a long time. In effect, Spufford set out to describe, in a sweeping narrative from the s to the end of the s, the Soviet dream, and the feeling of exhilaration at the end of the 50s when, at great cost, incredible economic growth was achieved and a strong infrastructure was built within the Soviet sphere.
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He captures the idealistic hopes that the Soviets would create a post-scarcity society that would easily compete with, and improve upon, the capitalist system - as well as the fraying of those hopes as the system became more cynical, in turn creating a nation that was far more cynical. If you ever wanted to learn more about something that's always been described as little more than an "Evil Empire" in Western culture, it's an incredible read.
Dec 26, Emmkay rated it it was amazing Shelves: The author usually writes non-fiction, and initially set out to do so here, but somewhere along the line he settled on a marvellous structure of interrelated fictional vignettes, each section framed both by a quotation from a Russian fairy tale and by an italicized non-fiction introduction to the historical developme Face it, you've been waiting all your life for a fictional account of the intricacies of mid-twentieth century Soviet economic planning, WITH FOOTNOTES, and you didn't even know it!
The author usually writes non-fiction, and initially set out to do so here, but somewhere along the line he settled on a marvellous structure of interrelated fictional vignettes, each section framed both by a quotation from a Russian fairy tale and by an italicized non-fiction introduction to the historical developments in question. The particular focus is on the USSR's mid-century shift to try to move from the quick ramping up of an industrial economy to the creation of 'plenty' for its citizens, and its challenges.
Well-explained, and the stories are funny, poignant, and illuminating. Even Karl Marx, I suspect, would have found the Soviet economy of the s an inside-out sort of place. Each spring, factories would guess the quantities of goods and materials they were going to need the following year, and order them; only in summer would the state planning committee Gosplan tell them what they were supposed to produce, and how much.
In a piquant series of linked short stories in the middle of the book, Spufford shows how it worked in practice. We see Maksim Mokhov, a kindly bureaucrat in Gosplan, helping out a viscose factory that has had one of its machines destroyed in an accident by commanding a plant in the Urals to supply them with an updated version of the machine. Next, we cut to Chekuskin, the shady middleman working outside official channels to help desperate factory bosses deal directly with one another. Chekuskin is called in because the Urals plant is refusing to give the viscose factory the updated machine.
It's the wrong price, apparently — it's not too expensive, it's too cheap. The reason it's too cheap is because it weighs less than the machine it replaces, and since it's a machine from the chemical industry, it's priced according to how much it weighs, as if it were an amount of coal. It should be pointed out that this isn't an actual, recorded event. Spufford's method is to create fictional characters and fabricate incidents closely based on real anecdotes and contemporary observations.
His book comes without an index, but it does have 53 pages of notes explaining the convergence and divergence of fact and fiction. It's a method that would normally repel me, but the audacity of the subject and the superb craftsmanship of the writing won me over.
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This is not a dry book, even though at times the economic reasoning can be hard to follow. Spufford invests his characters with loves, joys, whimsy and weakness and puts them in believable worlds — sometimes eerily so, given that he doesn't speak Russian.
He can get carried away with his own virtuosity — the detailed descriptions of how a computer works and how cancer begins are as superfluous as they are brilliant — but more often his stories cut richly, subtly to the point. The interlude where Chekuskin the middleman enters the parallel Soviet universe of life criminals, the Lawful Thieves, foreshadows the criminalisation of the Soviet economy, and a gruesome tale of childbirth, with pain forcing a woman to exploit her husband's party connections to get some painkillers, suggests the birth of corruption in a grimly literal way.
Apparently Soviet obstetricians used to tell expectant mothers that labour pain was a myth invented by capitalist doctors. Red Plenty is not merely a series of quaint historical vignettes. In the end, although there were moments in the 20th century when the Soviet Union ran the US and western Europe pretty close when it came to the war on want, it was never a contender in the war of people getting what they want. But the materialism of both sides, the idea that plenty is the ultimate goal of society, is a mean-minded sort of dream. Soviet planning of the kind Spufford writes about lives on now only in North Korea and Cuba.
But in the contrast between the two kinds of capitalism today — authoritarian capitalism like modern China's versus democratic capitalism like America's — we see the same race to be the better provider of consumer plenty. It's become commonplace to hear Britons returning from Moscow, Dubai or Singapore ridiculing democracy as so much "faffing about", getting in the way of business. I'd like to think that Britain and America would prefer democracy even if we lost Khrushchev's race to get the best cold drink to the guy on the beach, not because we've won so far.